Week 10: Contour maps

This week we had to draw contour lines - they are for yearly precipitation for the state of Georgia - on a map in Adobe Illustrator. First we had to draw the contour lines by hand, using a paper map that had point data from dozens of spots, about one per county (Georgia, it turns out, has 159 counties). We had to interpolate the point data manually, eyeballing the lines from point to point, in order to create the contour lines. Then we were to transfer the lines from the printed map to the map in Adobe Illustrator.

I thought the process of creating the contour lines was tremendously interesting, as well as a challenge, especially where the data went down and then up and down again - since rainfall inconveniently does not go smoothly in one direction up (or down) across the state. I found myself resorting to a beautiful 1970s book of maps of British Columbia for a better look at how one deals with the ins and outs of contour lines; this in turn reminded me pleasantly that I've been fascinated by maps for a really long time.

As usual, Adobe Illustrator provided its own set of challenges. I had hoped to color the spaces in between the lines, but my technical skills in Illustrator aren't yet up to the job and I gave up after I got the easy parts (the closed loops) done. The map still has problems. I made a mistake somewhere and couldn't correct it: even after selecting every one of the 159 counties and clicking on the "stroke" icon to correct the county outlines, I was unable to get several counties to match the rest exactly in outline color: you can see this at the south end of the state. But it is recognizably Georgia! and the contour lines are there, so that's how it stands.

Week 9: Flow Maps

For this week's lab we had to take a world map in ArcGIS, decide on its projection, and transfer the map to Adobe Illustrator to add flow arrows showing the number of people gaining legal permanent residence in the U.S. in 2007 from each continent.

After printing and rejecting several projections, I decided on Buckminster Fuller's icosahedral one (similar to gnomonic apparently) because it preserves shape well and the continents weren't tremendously distorted in size, and because I've always been intrigued by Fuller and this was my first opportunity to use an invention of his! It did however complicate my north arrow positioning, with which ArcMap did not help me. I am afraid that the north arrow in Illustrator is the result of me blindly aiming for the North Pole.

This time I found the Illustrator videos were quite helpful - having the narrator not rush the words made a big difference. As for the data, I separated arrows for Canada from the flow from the rest of North America because they were coming from two different directions. I chose not to include the GIS file of all the individual U.S. states, since I thought they would only clutter a map that does not display which states are the particular destinations of immigrants.

Dot Density Maps

This week we had to take some Florida population / housing unit / land area data, in Excel calculate housing density (I used housing units per land area rather than per total area) and create a map of housing density, using Adobe Illustrator again.

I ended up creating two maps because we had a lot of confusion about which we should be doing, raw housing unit (or population) data versus density (units per area). I wanted to see how different the maps would look. In the end I haven't really answered this question well because in the density map for some reason I didn't position the dots as randomly as in the housing units map. The dots in the housing units map are also very slightly larger than those in the density map - 0.8 pixels instead of 0.7 pixels each. I had tried selecting all the dots and then transforming them "Each", but when I did this with large transformations the dots moved as well as expanding/contracting, so I haven't really solved this problem. Overall the maps look quite similar in terms of county-to-county relative amounts of dots, despite differing distributions from map to map within the individual counties.

I feel more comfortable with the housing units map, or at least with the idea of mapping raw data with dots rather than density with dots, but I could see mapping density at the county level if the data were census tracts or something finer than county level. I would like to try this exercise out in ArcMap. I haven't yet learned how to make a template (assuming this is possible) in Illustrator, which may be why not all of my map pieces are identical - the north arrow is in a slightly different place in each, for instance.

Other than that and my gradual lessening of alarm while in Illustrator, I learned how to make a north star a la the cartography text, which pleased me.

Week 7: using proportional symbols

This week we had to take a simple map of European countries in ArcMap and export it to Adobe Illustrator so we could add proportional symbols in Illustrator. The data came from an Excel file of wine consumption for each country. We had to convert the figures for wine consumption using the formula for representing values via circles (it involves square roots), and represent each country's wine consumption with a circle of the appropriate size.

This went pretty well, a bit to my astonishment but now I have a better idea of how to organize my layers and am a bit more likely to be able to undo unintended errors. In Adobe I did have two peculiar unwanted rectangles that refused to be selected (and hence, to go away), but fortunately they disappeared from the final map when I exported it to a .jpeg. Next time we do something in Adobe Illustrator I'll try making a decent north arrow. If I had more time I'd put the Excel info into ArcMap and see how different that map looked, but I feel pressed for time. I still feel a bit at sea in Illustrator, although I think I can spy land.

Week 6: Using Adobe Illustrator to make cloropleth maps

For this week's assignment we first had to create a simple color cloropleth map of population change state by state in the U.S., open the map in Adobe Illustrator and make a few more changes as needed. This went reasonably well until the Illustrator part, although I also had problems with projection because we had to include Hawaii and Alaska on the map. Eventually I put Alaska in a different data frame (and different projection). The map ended up having about three different data frames and I had trouble arranging them all.

For the second, grayscale, map, we had to open an Excel file of the 1990 and 2000 population figures for each state, calculate the percent change in population for each state, and aggregate the data into averages for each of the regional census divisions (there are 9 of these). The range of values for this second map had to be categorized on an equal interval scale, unlike the color map (map #1), the data for which was categorized according to natural breaks. Then we had to open the first map in Adobe Illustrator, convert the colors for each state to grayscale, and assign the correct color on the grayscale scale to each state, according to where it sat in the census division region. This tinkering also included redoing the numbers for the legend. This wasn't quite as bad as I thought it wuold be, as I am now figuring out how to organize layers and objects in Illustrator, more or less.

Only map #2 (grayscale) is in landscape format, but #1 will have to stay in portrait orientation for now, as I only managed to save the file for #1 in the right format when I was halfway through the changes to the map to make it into #2!

Week 5: South/Central Florida's Hispanic Population, in Adobe Illustrator

This week's assignment was to take a ready-made map in Adobe Illustrator and rearrange the items so that the information was displayed better. We also had to add a north arrow and a neatline. You can see the original on the far left; the one on the right is mine after my changes.

I had a lot of trouble with this assignment and I'm not perfectly satisfied with the end result, though I do think it is an improvement. It took me ages to get the legend in the right place relative to the south/central map of counties. I admit I did not see the videos before getting the map done as I kept getting error messages when I tried (in fact AFTER uploading the final image to this blog I tried one more time and lo and behold, this time the first video worked) - I have been consulting a book on Adobe (and various Help messages on their website) .

I removed the extra zeroes that were originally in the legend percent figures, as they are statistically meaningless as well as confusing to the reader. I used the Kuler tool to find a "swatch" of five colors, but I could not find a Kuler swatch that simply went from light to dark and the one that was closest to what I wanted had two reds that I could not distinguish once they were on the map, so I changed one of the colors in the five-color range to make the differences clearer.

I didn't like any of the arrows that Adobe offers - importing a graceful one would be better - so I compromised by thinning one of their arrows once it was on the screen. I couldn't do anything about the scale bar, which looks too big and clumsy - and is now equidistant from the small-scale and the large-scale Florida map - but I had to let it stand. Maybe when I have better skills I'll be able to fix that! In a word - Phew. I'm glad to have this lab over.

Week 4: Using Adobe Illustrator in labeling a map

This is my first stab at Adobe Illustrator. The assignment was to label this map of part of the Florida Keys: we were to label four bodies of water, three parks or city features (a country club, a state park and an airport), three cities or towns, and seven islands (keys).

Apart from the frustration of using a new program for the first time and my inability to separate parts of the drawing from other parts (so that I could fill the state park in in green, which you see I have not managed to do), my main dilemma was how to represent things. In particular, the map is absent a legend because there is essentially nothing symbolized. I fear this may come back to haunt me. I did choose to represent the labels with different colors to separate park from water body from island(key).

I have the feeling that there's a lot about Adobe Illustrator that would be very useful, though I don't feel competent enough to enjoy its capacities yet.